Putting a Price on Plastic Sparked Lombok’s First Recycling Plant
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Every year, Lombok loses up to $43 million to unmanaged plastic waste – an invisible tax on the island’s economy, health, and environment.. We were commissioned to answer a question no one in Indonesia had quantified before: what is the true social cost of plastic pollution in a low- and middle-income country?
In the wake of the 2018 Lombok earthquakes, our client wanted to rebuild schools using recycled plastic blocks.
We saw an opportunity to go further - to pioneer the first estimate of the economic, health, and environmental costs of plastic waste in such a context. Our analysis combined education impacts from faster school reconstruction with a novel valuation of avoided plastic pollution, mapping costs across landfill leakage, open burning, land dumping, and marine.
The results were striking: plastic waste that isn’t recycled costs Lombok up to $360 per tonne, adding up to $43 million per year in social costs. Combined with the benefits of accelerating school rebuilding, every rupiah invested in recycled plastic would return 15–16 rupiah in social value - mostly improved learning for children.
The impact was immediate. The findings helped our client sign an MoU to build Lombok’s first plastic recycling factory - now processing thousands of tonnes of plastic each year.
The project was featured in the South China Morning Post, ABC Australia, and Al Jazeera amplifying the findings to an international audience.
This project shows how rigorous economic analysis can turn an environmental liability into a compelling business case for action.
"The report by Mettalytics demonstrated to our stakeholders that we had carefully considered the value-for-money proposition of the recycled plastic schools. It reached senior Ministers in the government of Indonesia, the World Bank, IFC and donor agencies in Australia and Finland who were all impressed by the rigour of the analysis and the relevance of the policy insights."
Duncan Ward
CEO, Classroom of Hope